


A Step Behind

by thedevilchicken



Category: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Genre: Background Case, Canon Gay Character, Community: smallfandomfest, Costumes, Hand Jobs, Injury, Injury Recovery, M/M, Realization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 15:16:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4268148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry takes a solo case that's not quite what it seems; Perry lets him, which should've been a warning. Harry's been a step behind the whole time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Step Behind

“You remember the night we met?” Harry asks, right on the point of unconsciousness. 

Perry sighs his usual long-suffering sigh. “The night you got your ass handed to you by some pretentious movie dick and I cleaned you the fuck up,” he says. “Yeah, Harry, I remember.”

“Yeah, well, that was _way_ worse than this.”

Perry, on the other hand, doesn’t look convinced. 

***

It all started two weeks ago. 

Harry being Harry, when a pretty girl called on the phone (he assumed she was pretty mostly because she _sounded_ great) and asked him to help her find her sister… well, he found himself saying yes without really thinking too much about it. When Perry got back in from wherever he’d been and Harry had long since stopped trying to either guess or tail the guy because Perry was pretty fucking taciturn on the subject of his own private life sometimes and pretty damn good at giving him the slip when he wanted to, Harry told him he’d taken on a case and braced for impact. Perry cuffed him around the head then told him fine, okay, whatever, go ahead and do that. Harry remembers being surprised and faintly suspicious but triumph overrode all of the more sensible emotions. 

“Run with it,” Perry told him, taking a seat at the desk once he’d swept Harry’s feet down off of it. “You’ve gotta learn to fly solo sometime.”

Harry said nothing about Perry’s mixed metaphor - he’d been reading online articles about that kind of thing when he should probably have been working just so he wouldn’t sound _quite_ so dumb around Perry and Harmony and was just itching to try out his new-found knowledge to their absolute inevitable dazzlement - and just got to work instead. It seemed like the safer course of action because Perry hated being corrected. Of course, pretty much every time Harry had ever tried it before, he’d been wrong and Perry wasn’t exactly slow to point that out. 

The problem was, he had no leads and Harmony kept on calling about the surprise party she was throwing for her uber-rich new hubby out at their place in the hills in a couple of weeks. There were only so many ways Harry could tell her he was _not_ getting dressed up like some kind of an idiot and going to a costume party for a guy he’d met once and had a subsequent intense desire to jab in the eye with a cocktail fork, but somehow she never quite got the hint. 

He tried the girl’s last known residence on his way out to test hors d’oeuvres. He swung past her workplace while Harmony was trying on costumes she complained bitterly that he should be looking at. He interviewed her friends on the way back from checking out ice sculptures and tried to act like he hadn’t gone ahead and licked one of the samples, got his tongue stuck and burned off a quarter inch of taste buds. No one knew a damn thing, or at least they weren’t telling him anything and that pretty much just pissed Harry off ‘cause people _always_ knew things and people _always_ hid them and it _always_ led to tears or gunshots or corpses getting peed on in showers. But he guessed he’d be out of a job if the entire world suddenly started telling the truth and even if the pay was lousy and the benefits non-existent, at least he’d stopped stealing shit. He’d never been all that great at stealing shit anyway, and at least PI work was (mostly) legal.

So he checked her residence again while Harmony called him incessantly on his cell trying to get him to discuss place settings like he gave a damn about napkin rings and whether or not she needed salad forks, checking under the mattress and under drawers and in the goddamn toilet cistern which was pretty damn gross because seriously, the last thing he wanted was toilet water dripping all over his brand new shoes while he tried not to let his cell phone hit the bowl. It fell _into_ the bowl. He sighed as he fished it out but hey, at least Harmony couldn’t call to talk china patterns like any of that shit mattered at a party where everyone would pretty much be turning up to get shitfaced at the free bar. He knew that was what he’d be doing, at least, if he actually went, and of course he’d go because he’d never hear the end of it if he didn’t. Besides, Perry was going. He wanted to see what Perry would go _as_.

There was a CD taped to the underside of the microwave like that was a great place for keeping all your computer-related shit and a baggie of drugs shoved inside an empty Coke can in the refrigerator. With his soaked cell in a ziploc bag in the glove box and his exciting new leads tucked into his inside pocket, he headed back to Perry’s place. 

Perry ran his business out of his home, what might’ve been the lounge under its former owner set up as an office, open plan kitchen in the back, bedroom-bathroom-study upstairs. He didn’t have a huge amount of space there ‘cause he didn’t really need it for one guy, but half the time Harry was there instead of at his own crappy apartment and somehow that made the place seem more crowded, or at least that was what Perry said when he got irritated that Harry was still there on a Saturday night watching his TV and drinking his vodka on the office couch. Not that he usually did much more than bitch and tell Harry to at least use a fucking glass for his alcohol and stop swigging out of the bottle like a lush when he joined him.

Harry had his own computer - an ancient desktop with a monitor that weighed almost as much as he did - and so while Perry sat over on his side of the desk (and Harry wasn’t sure when _sides of the desk_ had happened, exactly, like he wasn’t sure how he’d wound up with an end of the couch or a usual coffee cup or a spot in the driveway, let alone a toothbrush in the bathroom) and went through the files for whatever case it was he was working, Harry scoured the CD he’d picked up. 

It was a really, really bad(ly) shot amateur gay porno. Perry looked pretty fucking amused while Harry watched it through to the end for clues, then tried it again in case he’d missed something. There was nothing there, so he turned to the drugs and that was when Perry _really_ started to look intrigued. But he kept back. Hey, it was Harry’s case, he had to run with it till he learned to fly or whatever bullshit Perry had said seven days before when he’d said yes to a girl he’d never met over the phone. 

The stuff looked like E with groovy little faces stamped into each pill and Harry guessed it was going to be pretty easy to find someone selling stuff like that - he tried a few clubs, talked to a few bouncers, a few bartenders, a few waitresses, got a couple of tips while Harmony was on the phone making sure he’d picked out his costume. He’d picked out his costume. 

He struck out on all counts - so much for _pretty easy_ \- till he ran into Flicka at the Domino Room and she said yeah, sure, some guy had tried to sell that stuff in the bathroom and gotten himself thrown out about a week ago. So he talked to a few of the girls in the club, all smiles and charm and a little baggie of drugs until one said she thought maybe the hooker at the bar might know something about it. 

She was a fairly obvious hooker, legs up to her neck and a skirt maybe the width of a belt and she said yeah, a guy she knew sold that kind of pill near where she worked sometimes. Harry only got into a little bit of trouble, just an ounce of it, a scintilla, when he left the bar with a prostitute and Flicka told Harmony and Harmony told Perry who was like some kind of fucking disappointed avuncular even when Harry explained _why_ he’d been consorting with hookers. Really, Harry was just pretty damn impressed he knew what _avuncular_ meant. To be completely fair, Perry looked impressed too.

And so then, two weeks from the start, the night of the party had finally come around. 

“Lockhart and van Shrike,” Perry said at the door, like a doorman was normal for Harmony now she was married and like _Lockhart and van Shrike_ didn’t sound like some kind of firm of ambulance-chasing shysters instead of reputable PIs. Pretty reputable, at least. Or maybe Perry was reputable and Harry just had a reputation. 

Fifteen minutes later, he’d somehow given eagle-eyed Perry the slip and grabbed a cab down the street. Turned out it was a really fucking bad idea because twenty after that he was sprawled on his face in an alley trying not to breathe in a puddle of what looked like three-day-old decomposed lo mein. 

Ten minutes after that, he was sitting in the front seat of Perry’s Merc with the top down somewhere west of Sunset when it really got surreal because before that they’d just pretty much looked like two more guys at Harmony’s costume party. She made a great Cleopatra to her hubby’s Antony - Perry had said something under his breath about Liz Taylor and Richard Burton and Harry half choked on an ice cube till Perry smacked him between the shoulderblades with the heel of his hand so hard he launched the damn thing across the room - but right then the police were there and a bike flagged them down and Perry looked _so_ very fucking unimpressed. 

“We’re not cruising, officer,” Perry said, gesturing to the row of hookers who were trying pretty desperately to avoid all eye contact with all parties concerned like turning around and rifling through their purses made them look innocent somehow. 

“He’s gay,” Harry said, helpfully, holding his ribs and pretty glad he was still wearing his mask because damn, he was fucked up again. Perry pursed his lips when he looked at him. “Well, you are!”

Perry turned back to the officer with a shrug of his caped shoulders. “Yeah, I am,” he said. “Look, we’re on the job here.” He flashed some ID and the officer looked from Perry to Harry and back again then just shook his head like working this one out was a step too far into the weird for him that particular evening. 

“You fellas have a nice night now,” he said, and started back for his bike. “And hey, you might want to consider ditching the suits if you don’t want to attract the kooks around here.” 

Harry looked at Perry. Perry looked at Harry. As the officer beat a hasty retreat, Harry was pretty sure they _were_ the kooks. Of course, he should’ve known that the second he’d been pistol-whipped to the ground by a pimp toting a Glock and Perry had appeared from nowhere dressed like the freaking Caped Crusader. Iron Man getting rescued by Batman had made the pimp in question make a hilarious double-take as Harry put a boot into his ribs and then they hightailed it out of there and into Perry’s waiting Mercedes.

Of course, it wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when Perry was helping him into the office and Harry caught sight of the two of them in the shiny glass of the front windows, that Harry really _knew_ they were the kooks in the story. 

***

“You need a hospital,” Perry says. 

"I don't need a hospital," Harry says. 

"You _need_ a hospital," Perry says. 

“You remember the night we met?” Harry asks, right on the point of unconsciousness. 

Perry sighs his usual long-suffering sigh. “The night you got your ass handed to you by some pretentious movie dick and I cleaned you the fuck up,” he says. “Yeah, Harry, I remember.”

“Yeah, well, that was _way_ worse than this.”

Perry, on the other hand, doesn’t look convinced, so unconvinced that he doesn’t even say anything about that sentence being pretty fucking ambiguous ‘cause does Harry mean getting the shit kicked out of him or meeting Perry was the low point of that particular evening? So Harry reaches over and pats him on the face like that’s ever a sensible move so maybe he _does_ need a hospital. He washes a Percocet down with a swig of vodka instead and thinks maybe he just heard Perry say he was sorry then roll his eyes.

“Tell me about it in the morning,” Harry says, and he tries to close his eyes but Perry slaps him right across the face and makes him curse. He says something about concussion that makes Harry stick out his tongue and Perry mutter under his breath about the benefits of developing some fucking maturity now Harry’s just turned 35. 

“It’s my birthday,” Harry says, suddenly aware that that’s true. 

“You’re a fucking genius,” Perry says, and when he sticks his hand straight down the front of Harry’s plasticky Iron Man costume he’s still wearing the Batsuit and Harry laughs while Perry gives him what’s maybe the third weirdest handjob of his life. It's like the time he woke up in the hospital after Harmony left and Perry was stretched out next to him in his goddamn silk pyjamas with his hands under Harry's gown and the only reason he'd given him was _thought you'd want to see if it’s all in working order downstairs_ , like that was a practical reason for getting jerked off while semi-conscious. Harry still hasn't worked out if he minded or not and he guesses that means something. 

And while Perry bitches in his ear about the effects of concussion while one gloved hand’s around his dick and Harry’s trying not to think about the fact he’s still not found the girl. He has photos of her and she’s pretty and he wants to find her maybe not just because of the two thousand dollars in Perry’s business account but that doesn’t hurt. He knows he’s starting to pass out when Perry gives up on the handjob and goes down on his knees because that’s never happened before, Perry’s gloved hands tossing bits of plastic suit all over the damn office so he can tug down his pants and heave a hefty sigh before he takes him in his mouth like he’s doing some kind of public service. Harry guesses that’s one way to keep him from passing the fuck out on the couch.

The girl in the photos is objectively pretty but Harry’s gotta admit he’s just not felt it in a while. Maybe it’s all the slow afternoons when cases were stalled and Perry maybe still felt a little guilty for getting Harry’s balls hooked up to electrodes so he’d given him a pretty literal hand, telling him it was perfectly normal that guys couldn’t get it up sometimes (not that he ever had that problem personally but that was what he heard) and Harry wanted to ask him what the fuck he was doing but was too unnerved by the fact that he was totally lacking in erections to care that the only attention that area had gotten in weeks was from an obnoxious gay guy who also happened to be his boss. 

So then Perry had resorted to telling sexy stories while he did it, sitting there on the office couch with his hands down Harry’s pants, but of course all of Perry’s sexy stories were _gay_ sexy stories so when Harry got it up and got off all breathy and grumbling he was doing it to the time Perry did Tom Cruise in a hotel bathroom like that was a surprise somehow or some college jock back east who’d liked getting handjobs while watching hockey games because he thought getting off to sports made it somehow substantially less homo. So maybe, Harry thinks, something in his junk had gotten its default setting rewired from _straight_ to _gay_ when Perry got him working again down there. Perry would probably have told him biology doesn’t work that way but Harry’s still pretty convinced. 

“Hey, Per,” he’d said one afternoon, interrupting a story just the way Perry hated while he was attempting to get his hand into Harry’s too-tight jeans. “What’s it like to, y’know, do it with a guy?”

“I can show you if you like,” Perry said. 

“Really?”

Perry sighed. “No, asshole, not really.”

Which was, of course, the point at which Harry realised he had a problem. Because even after the plumbing had all gotten back to normal, he still had his gay boss feeling him up on a regular basis and he wasn’t doing a thing to stop it. He kinda liked it, even if Perry batted his hands away every time he tried to touch him back like he was allergic or something. That’s weird, he thinks.

And so, he promptly passes out with his dick in Perry’s mouth and thinks no more about it. 

***

The disappearance was all a sham. 

“The party was for _you_ , Harry,” Harmony tells him the next morning, as he lies there in Perry’s bed and rubs his face like rubbing his face will make him feel less like he got beaten to the ground with the butt of a pimp’s gun. “It was a surprise birthday party. The disappearance was just a set-up to keep you occupied.”

“But the apartment,” Harry says. “The CD, the drugs?”

“Flicka’s stewardess girlfriend’s out of the country and we used her place,” Harmony said. “Everyone was in on it. The CD was Perry’s idea.” Perry shrugs, nonplussed, and Harry guesses gay porn plant should’ve been a tip-off when it was so completely and utterly unconnected to anything else. “I’ve got no idea about the drugs.”

Perry fills him in on that later and he should be mad at them both but Harmony’s so fucking nice and well-meaning and the one link to the past he doesn’t kinda resent and Perry’s so fucking _Perry_ that it’s hard to give a damn about it after all. Apparently, in the face of a fake investigation that Harry should’ve _known_ was fake from the beginning considering how quick - quickly - what the fuck - Perry had agreed to it, Harry had stumbled into some unrelated drugs thing that had nearly gotten him shot in an alley then rescued by Batman in a Benz. It was like the time Perry cut his hair and shaved off his goatee and Harry didn’t notice for three days. Sometimes it took some time for the other shoe to drop, whatever the hell that even means. 

“On the plus side, you got a drug-dealing pimp sent to county lock-up,” Perry says, once Harmony’s headed back home, something about the caterers leaving the place like a zoo and goddamnit Harry you only stayed at your own birthday party for fifteen fucking minutes, try harder next time. 

“And got rescued by Batman,” Harry says, with a shrug that makes his head hurt except _breathing_ makes his head hurt, too. “How many guys can say that, huh?” And he thinks Perry made a pretty convincing Batman, too, even if most of the suit was made of rubber and he kinda looked like something out of a kinky fetish magazine. Perry, on the other hand, had said he had no idea who in the hell Iron Man even was until Harry started leaving comics around the office and then he’d told him to fuck off, he’d read Avengers comics in high school, Tony Stark was hot. Of course, on the down side, he has a bump on the back of his head the size of a golf ball and even resting it there on the pillow makes it hurt.

And speaking of pillows, it’s about that point that he realises he’s in Perry’s bed. It’s about that point that he remembers what Perry did last night. In an instant he knows it’s written all over his face and Perry, motherfucking Perry, just sits there and smirks at him from the chair next to the bed like he knew he’d get there in the end. 

Perry’s 45 years old and actually comes from Baltimore rather than just having visited there that one time. He has a master’s degree in forensic science and a bachelor’s in something Harry can’t actually pronounce, two sisters and a mom and dad who still aren’t quite sure that _private investigator_ isn’t a euphemism for something gayer but are apparently proud of him anyway. He likes shooting guns at the range and likes turtlenecks even when the weather’s too hot for them and male grooming products but Harry’s pretty sure that’s not just a gay thing, just a Perry thing. He picks the pepperoni off of his half of the pizza and dumps it onto Harry’s because he likes the taste but not the texture and Harry likes to joke about his disdain for Italian sausage in a way that makes Perry give him that glare Harry’s not sure is real or mocking or both. Probably both. It’s usually both.

“Was that just a one-time thing or were you planning on doing it again?” Harry says, trying to sound offhand when he’s actually just realised something else it’s taken him weeks to realise and he’s about to jump out of his skin with it, were that possible and not a really gross notion that he gets stuck in his head and distracted with for a second. “Because going down on a guy when he’s semi-conscious, Per, that’s some pretty dubious fucking shit. They teach you that in gay school?”

“Sure, they teach all the faggots how to feel up their concussed employees,” Perry says. “Where did you think I got the idea, fucking Oprah?”

Harry laughs and it hurts and he closes his eyes and when he opens them again, Perry actually looks kind of concerned. That’s unnerving to say the least but he’s pretty sure he’s had worse. After all, he survived shooting. This is just going to require a little more Percocet and a couple of days in bed. 

“I think I figured out why Harmony thinks I give a fuck about china patterns and all that bullcrap,” Harry says. Perry raises his brows and Harry looks triumphant because he’s so damn sure he’s figured out something Perry doesn’t know. “She thinks I’m your boyfriend.” 

Of course, Perry leans back in his seat, folds his arms over his chest and he looks amused. He doesn’t look surprised at all. Harry rubs at his eyes like maybe that’ll help and he’ll open them again to find Perry’s agape but that’s pretty fucking unlikely, even he knows that. 

Perry’s not so impenetrable as Harry’s been fooling himself he is except maybe that’s because Perry’s been doing his detective work for him. Perry’s let him know things, let him chat on the phone with one of his sisters and drive the car sometimes though he bitched about who the hell taught him to drive stick when Harry ground the gears the first time and Harry realised no one ever had. So Perry did, complaining the whole time about his signals and his use of mirrors and the fact that he couldn’t tell third gear from fifth like a fucking infant. But he did it. Like he taught him to shoot and taught him surveillance and taught him how to use tongs and a fork to eat escargot like that shit was ever going to be useful. Except sometimes it was because it turned out Harmony likes classic French cuisine and keeps inviting him over like she’s still feeling guilty that it didn’t work out between them. Perry keeps teaching him things. He bitches, but he does it. 

And there it is: turns out Harry’s one realisation behind just like always.

“Shit,” Harry says. “I _am_ your boyfriend, aren’t I.”

Perry smirks. “Well, I don’t keep you around for your dizzying intellect.”

Harry weighs this up as Perry watches him and of course Perry knows how he’s going to react. Except maybe this time he doesn’t or he just thinks that he does because Harry would like to think, would _really_ like to think he’s not a totally open book like the Johnny Gossamer novel with the bullet hole in it that Perry’s still got in his desk drawer as he closes his eyes and sinks down in the bed and pulls up the sheets to his chin. He’s wearing a pair of Perry’s pyjamas underneath the sheets; they feel nice and he wonders faintly in the back of his mind where his Iron Man suit ended up, how he wound up in pyjamas while he was passed out and he guesses naked and unconscious is pretty far from the most compromising position Perry’s ever seen him in. 

Maybe now one of these days he’ll get to see Perry naked and not just wind up getting off with Perry’s hand stuck down his pants and maybe he’ll let him touch him if he uses sanitiser on his hands and promises not to jab him with his fingernails in any sensitive areas. Maybe Perry won’t mind that he’s missing a finger or maybe Perry won’t mind that and that sounds just like Perry, the perv. He’d like to find out what it’s like to do it with a guy, he thinks, in a way that’s not just handjobs on a couch in front of old film noir that Perry hates, Perry picking the movie apart scene by scene as Harry tries not to feel like his brain’s melting straight out of his prick. He’s got the hots for Perry van Shrike and apparently Perry’s pretty hot for him, too and that shouldn’t be so reassuring. He should probably wonder what else he’s missing but he guesses he’ll find out; Perry always fills him in eventually when he notices he's till a step behind. And in the end he wouldn’t be the only guy with confused, confusing sexuality living in LA.

“Then for fuck’s sake come to bed,” Harry says, opening one eye. He smiles, showing his teeth and hoping he looks mischievous; he probably just looks like a semi-conscious doped-up lech but by now that's pretty much par for the course. “But maybe put the Batsuit back on first.”


End file.
